When children enter public kindergartens in the current atmosphere of high-stakes testing, they often encounter an emphasis on correctness that casts doubt on the integrity of their personally invented messages, prompting them to ask not "What did I write?" but "Is this right?" This ethnographic case study examines early writing by 23 kindergarten…

African American students are overrepresented in special education and underrepresented in gifted education. This is in large part due to students' poor performance in core academic areas such as reading, math, and writing. Differentiating instruction in early grades could assist in closing the writing performance gap between African American and…

Building crucial bridges between theory, research, and practice, this volume brings together leading authorities on the literacy development of young children. The "Handbook" examines the full range of factors that shape learning in and out of the classroom, from basic developmental processes to family and sociocultural contexts,…

The ways in which learning graphical representations can encourage the development of creativities in Chinese young children remain to be fully explored. Previous research on children's writing focused on children's symbolization with syllabic languages, providing little information regarding Chinese young children's symbolization and creative…

In this article, Boldt considers decisions teachers must make about the value of children's writing as a form of play in primary classrooms. She offers a brief history of the framing of this question at 1966 Dartmouth Conference on English, focusing particularly on the perspective of Jimmy Britton. She highlights the relationship between Britton's…

Young children benefit from having their stories written down and shared with others. The authors highlight two strategies for supporting young writers: taking dictation and translating "kid writing." They explain why both are important in introducing the purpose of writing and the functions of printed language. The article offers tips to teachers…

This paper explores a number of examples of what appeared to be recurring symbolic expressions of spirituality found in my recent research into the spiritual experiences of children in Victorian State primary schools. These expressions appeared in drawings and in conversation. In this paper I use hermeneutic phenomenology and a multidisciplinary…

Offering training to promote positive change seems easy, but getting teachers to implement real change in their classrooms is not. Many administrators are using action research--which many teachers use to improve teaching--to address training issues and to facilitate problem solving. In this article, the author shares her experience with using…

This paper reports on two studies which investigated the relationship between children's texting behaviour, their knowledge of text abbreviations and their school attainment in written language skills. In Study One, 11-12-year-old children provided information on their texting behaviour. They were also asked to translate a standard English…

Stonier, a second grade inclusion teacher, wanted to instill a love of writing in all 25 of the children in his class while offering a challenging curriculum for everyone. He made the children's writing meaningful by setting up a writing exchange with high school students. The project, beginning with the second-graders offering critiques of the…

Previous research on children's drawing and writing focused on children's drawing and symbolization with syllabic languages, providing little information regarding young children's symbolization in drawing with a logo language. This study investigated children's emergent writing by examining qualitatively how children's writing takes place as…

What significance does writing have for the young writer characters in a set of children's books? Twenty-five intermediate novels featuring characters who write were studied, using content analysis, to find out. The researchers present their findings by describing the characters and why they write. Reasons for writing range from exposing injustice…

Children's literacy skills are an important predictor of success in the early elementary grades. Education programs for at-risk preschool students target children's acquisition of specific literacy skills, including knowledge of letters of the alphabet, in preparing children for early school success. Writing has been proposed as a complementary…

Reflecting on the influence of English nursery rhyme poems on one individual Asian child's language development, the paper reviews current studies on the socio-cultural dynamics of creativity, to examine how these theoretical and empirical investigations may help shape specific pedagogical practices in the expressive language arts in a Hong Kong…

This paper draws upon data from a research project, undertaken in 2 Year 6 classrooms during the 2006 World Cup, to analyse how children used complex sentence structures in their writing on a football web-log. We explore how the confluence of a temporary, popular, global event and an online forum for communication created a moment of linguistic…